Indian Government Launched Its Own Operating System 'BOSS' To Replace Windows

BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) derived from Debian for enhancing the use of Free/ Open Source Software throughout India.The Beta Release of BOSS GNU/Linux Version 5.0 is coupled with GNOME Desktop Environment with wide Indian language support & packages, relevant for use in the Government domain. This release aims more at the security part and comes with an easy to use application to harden your Desktop. Currently BOSS GNU/Linux Desktop is available in all the Official Indian Languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Urdu, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani, Manipuri which will enable the mainly non-English literate users in the country.

It has successfully tested fending itself from all kinds of attacks during the past three months of trial. Several government agencies including the Army intelligence were given the task to attack it to test its vulnerability status but they all failed to break it.
“It answers government’s need have a fully secure network. Fresh codes unique to the system have been written for the OS. Its source code that makes it safe and secure will have to be guarded at all cost,” sources said.

I'm going with a large dose of pessimism although I'd be delighted if BOSS is a success. The Softpedia link has this:

It's also worth noting that one of the Fedora cloud engineers, Kushal Das, has said that BOSS is actually a disaster and that the developers working on it don't know what they are doing. "BOSS is a disaster, last time we had a chat with the devels, they never had any clue about CVE(s)."

Another Debian dev, Balasankar C, has also had some harsh words to say about BOSS and about the fact that Debian isn't even mentioned in the announcement.

It remains to be seen if BOSS will amount to anything, or it will go in the direction of all the other state-developed operating systems.

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And why the claim that it's totally indigenous (in the DNA link)?

The new Linux based OS is totally indigenous and has been developed with the help of Gujarat Technical University, DRDO and private computer geeks has more or less all the features and ease of Microsoft Windows, sources said.

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Mis-selling and misrepresenting will only hurt any venture.

Edit: And if they're planning to work in secrecy, they'll be losing out on all that various communities (and organzations) can offer.

I don't want to sound harsh, but Boss=Debian sans any security update + some local language addition + change in wallpaper + the nonsensical claim of indigenousness. Actually it's not a news, It has been the same since 2007 when it was first "created".